An open collection of baseball's little-known records and curiosities.

"He would have been among the league leaders in batting average for a majority of the season had he had enough plate appearances." -- 2008 St. Louis Cardinals Media Guide about non-roster invitee Mark Johnson

Sunday, January 6, 2008

Expanding on Yesterday's Post

I wanted to see what would happen if every team had scored their baserunners at both a league average clip and at the same rate the league-leading Colorado Rockies. Since I doubt there's any real way for a team to improve their numbers from year to year, all this is pointless and hypothetical, but it's fun to think about anyway.

First, I want to figure out the number of runs each team would have gained or lost by driving in 30.11% of their baserunners, the league average rate. Then, for fun, we can add these runs to the number the teams actually scored to see how their Pythagorean Winning Percentage and record are affected. I sorted the following table by each team's new Pythagorean Winning Percentage (remember Colorado and San Diego played 163 games). The final column shows how much each team's Pythagorean record changed from that derived from their actual runs scored.

Team

RS

RA

RS Change

Adj. RS

Adj. Pythag. Win %

Adj. Pythag. W-L

Pythag. Win Change

San Diego

741

666

-1

740

.548

89-74

0

Chicago

751

690

-1

751

.539

87-75

0

Colorado

820

758

-40

820

.536

87-76

-4

Atlanta

789

733

-21

789

.534

86-76

-2

New York

789

750

-15

789

.523

85-77

-1

Philadelphia

861

821

-31

861

.522

85-77

-2

Milwaukee

792

776

-9

792

.509

83-79

0

Los Angeles

737

727

2

737

.506

82-80

0

Arizona

721

732

9

721

.493

80-82

1

San Francisco

703

720

20

703

.489

79-83

2

Cincinnati

794

853

11

794

.467

76-86

1

Houston

754

813

31

754

.466

75-87

3

Washington

701

783

28

701

.450

73-89

3

St. Louis

742

829

17

742

.449

73-89

2

Florida

794

891

4

794

.447

72-90

0

Pittsburgh

721

846

-3

721

.427

69-93

-1

In the next table, I want to see what would have happened if every team had knocked in baserunners at the same rate the Rockies did: 31.96%. Since the league runs scored obviously goes up, I decided to distribute the increase in runs scored evenly across all sixteen teams' runs allowed. This perhaps isn't very fair to every team since all teams don't play each other the same number of times but this is already so hypothetical it doesn't matter all that much. :)